Dave and I drove into Grantham the next day. It wasn’t necessary to go through Greetham, fortunately, to visit the nearby towns. The track which led to Saxham continued past it to another side road. This detour added a few miles to the run to Stamford but was the quickest way to Grantham. It was about thirteen miles from Saxham to Grantham by this route.
We were in the middle of flat, open, agricultural country, yet only a mile or two from the Great North Road and within easy reach of half a dozen towns, large and small — Stamford, Grantham, Leicester, Oakham, Melton Mowbray, Nottingham, Loughborough — and numerous villages. Melton — once famous for pork pies — was nearer Saxham, but we formed the habit of going to Grantham because the road was better.
Grantham had a High Street, a market place, and ample evidence of a long and eventful history. We didn’t see much sign of pride, however. On the contrary, Dave and I were startled by the lack of it.
The towns we had passed through only the day before had been pretending everything was as usual. In Grantham there was no such pretense.
We didn’t see paggets walking about the street as if they owned the town, but for the first time in a town, we saw paggets. When we saw a cat slinking about, a cat with that super-feline tigerishness which distinguished the pacat from the ordinary cat, we shouted and expected to see the brute hounded to death, as it would have been in London.
Instead we saw something we had never seen before and had never expected to see. People slunk past the pacat, almost ignoring it but showing by the way they kept clear of it that they knew it was there. There was no attempt to destroy it, only a wary cognizance of it: “You leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone,” so to speak.
Finding that nobody else was paying any attention, Dave and I chased the cat. We’d have got it, too, but we suddenly realized that we’d left the car unguarded, and it was of more importance to us than a single pacat. So we returned.
• • •
The radio news broadcasts were still continuing, though all other broadcasting had ceased by this time. The bulletins told us very little except that in places there was an organized effort to clear whole areas of paggets, and that it wasn’t succeeding very well. What the newscasts had never told us, perhaps by design, perhaps because nobody knew, was how many people the paggets had killed and were killing.
Probably nobody knew. People simply went missing, and it was impossible to tell whether they’d gone somewhere else or had been killed by men or by paggets.
However, the indications were grim. A human being takes about eighteen years to reach maturity, a pagget anything from a few weeks to a year or two. None of the parats who had first brought about the death of a few isolated people were alive any more. But there had been many generations of rats since then, and no new generation of human beings.
Adding Mil’s figures for the Saxham group to Dave’s and mine, we had found that of our immediate friends and relatives more than half were known to be dead. Thus, counting Gloria, Stan, Carol, Mil, Laurie, the children, me; Dave, his wife, his two cousins, his father; Clare, Eva, their parents, another sister; Edith, her fiancé, her two uncles, an aunt — not counting the yeomen and their families — only eight were known to be still alive, though three more might be. Put in another way, of twenty-three people originally, twelve were known to be dead.
Dave and I agreed that of the fifty million people there had been in Britain before the advent of the paggets, probably not more than twenty million were still alive — possibly many fewer.
And in Grantham we saw plenty of evidence for this view. More than two thirds of the shops and houses were closed. True, many more people were generally to be found in any house which was occupied than formerly. Against the paggets there was safety in numbers. Some of the shops, moreover, must be closed either because they had no longer anything to sell or because nobody wanted to buy what they had. There was little sale for china ornaments, for example, or furniture, electric accessories, cameras, books, music, toys, and hundreds of other things which had now practically ceased to have any importance at all.
There were the first signs of inflation, too. I had expected it long before, and wondered why it didn’t happen. I think, now, there were two main reasons — there were fewer people demanding fewer goods, and the supply and demand continued to balance for a while; and most people, having lost their jobs, simply refused to pay high prices and so kept prices down.
Eventually, however, supply dropped well below demand, and it was clear from the prices being asked for most things in Grantham that inflation, held off for so long, was taking over. It would be regional at first. Eventually there would be inflation everywhere.
Money, then, soon wasn’t going to buy much. We spent all we had on things we could buy — cloth, which was very much cheaper than made-up clothes, ammunition, knives, cement, panes of glass, things for which we could see a future use and which we might not be able to make for ourselves. We made no attempt to buy food — food of all kinds was sold only at ruinous prices.
“Funny,” Dave remarked thoughtfully, “that never occurred to me.”
“What never occurred to you?”
“That that’s what would break up all the towns — the problem of supply. Thousands of villages must still be able to support themselves, but no town can.”
He was right: the towns would soon be deserted, simply because towns couldn’t possibly be independent, they had to live on the produce of the country ultimately, whether their supplies came from half across the world or from just outside their boundaries.
We found no difficulty in getting recruits. After a few tries, the method we adopted was simply to stop the people we met in the streets, the people we liked the look of, and talk to them about something, anything. Generally what they said made us lose interest in them — if they whined, if they begged, if they had lost hope, if they clearly had no goal in life beyond living out that day, we dropped them.
“Enough to make you cut yer ruddy throat,” a little man called Steve complained. “London was bad enough, but this! Cor lumme, up ‘ere they say yessir and nosir to the ruddy paggets and apologize if they get in their way…. They ain’t got no spirit, that’s the trouble.”
“Let me come with you, mister,” a girl called Betty begged. “You’ve got a car. We can find somewhere — there must be somewhere safe, somewhere … I’ll do everything for you, if only you keep them away from me — maybe an island would be best, an island they can’t swim out to …”
We took Steve; we got rid of Betty.
Mona was a girl we weren’t even going to speak to — she was so slight and nondescript, and I guess we’d been unconsciously looking for people who were in some way out of the ordinary. In the end, since she was looking at us curiously and came so close in passing, I gave her our little story.
She smiled, and we saw she was quite pretty after all. “Of course I’ll come,” she said. “Perhaps I can help you. I know a lot of people. Want me to tell you about some of them?”
So from then on Mona practically chose our party for us. I had to make a snap judgment about Mona; anyone in her position could palm off on us people whom she liked but who were no good to us at all, or people who would form a separate clique at Saxham, or people all of one set who duplicated each other’s temperament and abilities. However, Mona seemed bright and intelligent, and choosing people she knew and would vouch for could hardly be worse than picking up men and women we saw in the street.
With all the things we’d bought, we could take only two people in the car. Others we told how to join us as and how they could, warning them not to go by Greetham.
It seemed a grim way to look at it, but those who couldn’t find their own way to us we didn’t want anyway. Paggets would get a few of the people we talked to — they had thirteen miles to go on foot-others would change their mind and decide not to go; others never meant to go, even while they were talking to us and promising to join us.
Staying where they were required no effort, no imagination. Going somewhere else, making any change — and we warned the people we invited to join us that we weren’t opening the Garden of Eden to them — needed quite a lot of resolution.
We didn’t invite too many women. When we had formed a stable community, mostly male, it would be time enough to begin looking for women. The men we had collected would want some say in the selection of the women who joined us.
The people whom we directed to Saxham included two mechanics, a plumber, a university student, a bus driver, a carpenter, and a gardener, all men, and three even more miscellaneous women — a dancer, Mona, who had been a shop assistant, and a formerly wealthy matron who had been a nurse before that. We couldn’t choose their occupations, not when there were so few candidates who seemed to us eligible, but we considered ourselves reasonably lucky with that group. By no means all of them would ever arrive at Saxham, of course.
“Is that enough?” I asked Dave at last, “or should we try to get more? We won’t be able to use the car for long, you know.”
“Why not?” asked Dave. “You and I can both keep a car on the road, and we’ve got two mechanics as well.”
“Gas and oil,” I said briefly. “And tires.”
Steve was with us; we were taking him with us in the car, and Mona. We were waiting for Mona to tie up a few things before we left Grantham.
“Tires ain’t no problem,” said Steve eagerly. “We can pick up ‘alf a dozen spares here. Plenty of spares when there ain’t no cars to use them. Petrol’s no problem neither — there’s thousands of gallons in underground tanks that nobody ain’t got no use for now. If it was in tins, now, it wouldn’t last long, but it’s too much trouble to pump it by ‘and when there ain’t nothing much you can use it for when you’ve got it.”
“Something in that, Don,” Dave remarked. “Still, there’s lamps. Petrol wouldn’t be much good for lamps, nor oil, but if they were mixed — ”
“Cor blimey, I forgot that,” said Steve, dashed. “There ain’t no paraffin left, not with all these lamps being used these days. I forgot about mixing petrol and oil, but you’re right enough, cock, people will do it when it strikes them.”
It seemed to me, considering the matter, that the oil would go before the gasoline. There was so much more gas than oil left in the filling stations around the country that there would be gas left long after the oil to mix it with was exhausted.
Dave reverted to my original question. “We’ve got to do this by degrees,” he said. “If we send a whole army to Saxham, we may find it taking over from us. But if we add to it slowly, we’ll have a chance to assimilate each lot before the next comes along.”
So we left it at that for the moment.
We had one last illustration, before we left Grantham, of the way some people had simply given up. It came when we had collected Mona and driven into a filling station for gasoline.
It was one of those garages-cum-dwelling-houses where you often have to get the owner or his wife away from the fireside to supply you with gas, and quite often, unconsciously, whoever does come is grumpy at being dragged out of a comfortable armchair.
“Petrol?” said the thin, gray-haired man we had at last got outside. “You’ll get no petrol here.” And he turned to go back in.
“Why, are your tanks empty?” I called after him.
He stopped. Some other motive chased away the first. “Can you pay?” he asked.
“A reasonable price,” I said cautiously.
“Twenty-five bob a gallon,” he said hopefully, half cringing, half domineering.
I shook my head. “It’s not so difficult to get petrol as all that,” I said. “Five bob, perhaps.”
“Twenty-five bob or nothing,” he said loudly, still with that odd, crazy mixture of submission and aggression.
“Then it’s nothing,” I said, but didn’t turn to go yet. I had an idea this man, obviously a psychopath, whether he had been neurotic B.P. or not, might give in at any moment.
“It’s a bloody awful job winding it up by hand,” he said pleadingly.
“We’ll do that.”
He paused for a moment. Then he turned and went back into his house. “Take what you like,” he said morosely over his shoulder. “What the hell use is petrol to me, anyway? Or money either? The only thing that’s any use to anyone these days is a rope.”
He disappeared. We not only filled up for nothing, we got two gallons of oil as well. And since the big black car was surprisingly easy on oil, that would keep us going for some time.
Steve did as he had promised, too. He got hold of two spare tires which were the right size and another which he assured us he’d make fit somehow.
• • •
When we got back to Saxham a period of hard labor started. We spent five days in the fields, planting everything that we could use and which would grow. With our increased numbers, one thing obviously had to be done at once — the grassland inside the walls, set aside for pasture, now became a luxury. Our cattle would have to graze outside, well guarded, of course. The immensely valuable land within the walls of the estate had to be used for more important things — all of it.
We cut down the trees too. Though the timber was useful, that wasn’t why we felled the trees. With the whole farm open, naked, there was no longer any cover for attackers. From the upstairs windows of the house, particularly from the tower, which now became useful for the first time in its history, we could see for miles around. There were no hills worthy of the name. Surprise attack now became possible only at night.
Nat learned his lessons well and was soon probably the best of our watchdogs.
Once, just once, during this period there was an attack in force by parats — hundreds of them. They flowed in one afternoon while half a dozen of us were in the fields, and I probably wasn’t the only one who had a moment of sheer terror as I saw that brown and black flood pouring over the wall and spreading in all directions. It was what few people had seen, fortunately, but everybody dreaded — attack not by one rat, not by twenty, but by hundreds, capable of swarming over anything and leaving it bare in a matter of seconds, capable of running up a man’s body, tearing his clothes to shreds, eating the living flesh from his bones.
In the instant of realization, Clare screamed and Eva turned and ran for her life. Edith brought up her air gun and calmly pumped slugs into the black, brown, and gray mass. Dave spun his spade in his hand to make it a flail, waited for the onslaught, and smashed a dozen rats to mush under the blade.
Nat charged at the rats with a howl of pure joy. He caught rats in his teeth, shook them off his back, snapped his jaws viciously right and left, darted where the rats were thickest, and growled furiously when he had breath to spare. The other dogs weren’t far behind him. They seemed to sense the importance of carrying the fight to the parats, not allowing them to settle or scatter.
And the flood of rats was broken and routed. Ordinary rats, perhaps, would have fought longer and more savagely. These rats, however, saw very quickly indeed that for every few seconds they prolonged the encounter, a score of their number were dying.
I don’t suppose they had any feeling for each other — it meant little or nothing to any individual parat that scores of its companions were being killed — but they valued their own lives pretty highly, and it was soon clear that if the attack was sustained long enough, hardly a single parat would escape.
They ran — and we had the devil’s own job preventing the fighting-mad dogs from following them.
That encounter did us all a lot of good. On the one hand, it showed us how important it was to be ready for such an invasion, to rout the parats before they could accomplish anything; how strong and effective our defense force at Saxham was, and how different the result might have been elsewhere. On the other hand, we saw that even parats in their hundreds, something we had always feared, weren’t such a terrifying menace after all. The dogs, though bleeding from dozens of cuts and tears, were only superficially hurt. Their size, ferocity, and courage had kept the parats from harming them seriously even when they tore into the flood and let the rats swarm all round them. And we had found that men and women, too, had less to fear from swarms of rats than we had thought. We could protect ourselves, we could throw them off, we could crush them beneath our feet and make them run from us.
Only if hunger and despair drove them, so that they knew they would die outside the walls of Saxham as surely as inside, would parats ever be able to accomplish anything very serious against us — at any rate, as long as we had the dogs to fight the greater part of the battle for us.
“We owe Grimblo a vote of thanks,” I said to Mil as Nat licked his wounds, much the worse for wear but obviously well pleased with himself and with life.
“Maybe,” said Mil sceptically. “But we still won’t be able to trust Nat as a watchdog. He’d let the Knifers through — that’s what he’s here for.”
A week after our visit to Grantham most of the people we had spoken to had turned up, except the university student and the dancer. It was a pity they hadn’t appeared, for they had struck me as the two most resourceful people we’d spoken to. Possibly that was why they hadn’t come — they had found some other promising course of action, when most people couldn’t find even one.